Steam is now offering pre-purchases of Call of Duty: Black Ops in advance of the release of the military shooter sequel on November 9. Valve also confirms the game will be using Steamworks for various functions, saying:

In addition to leveraging Steamworks' Auto-Updating, Achievements, and more, Call of Duty: Black Ops will support Steamworks Cloud technology. The PC version of the product will be powered with Steamworks for both the digital and tangible versions of the game and, as with all Steamworks titles, offline play will also be supported.

"We are delighted to be delivering the year's most anticipated title with Black Ops to PC gamers around the world," said Jason Holtman, director of business development at Valve. "We've collaborated with the development team to leverage the Steamworks suite of services to deliver the highest level of service to Call of Duty: Black Ops PC customers."

"Steam has been a great partner throughout development of Black Ops," said Mark Lamia, president of Treyarch. "We're working closely together to take full advantage of Steamworks to ensure we deliver the most polished and secure PC experience that our community deserves."

Has Treyarch confirmed or denied the ability to alter the FOV in Black Ops yet? I know people have speculated a person could alter it since the developer console will be enabled, but again that is pure speculation.

It would be nice to get a definite one way or the other since the ex 'A-team' Infinity Ward went so far as to call changing the FOV a cheat for the previous Call of Duty game. You would think after all of the backlash Modern Warfare 2 received for not being able to alter the FOV, Treyarch would be all over mentioning it like they did with dedicated servers (another huge backlash from the game players).

Could it be that there is a limitation in the engine Infinity Ward created which would distort the game? Something that Treyarch is unable to overcome? It's quite possible they were unable to make any modifications to the engine in such a short timespan (sort of like Obsidian with Fallout New Vegas using Bethesda's Gamebryo / Fallout 3 engine).